Ceri Radford is Assistant Comment Editor of the Telegraph.

The problem for Harriet Harman…

Ah, Harriet Harman. Forgive me for coming late to this one (I blame my odd Tuesday to Saturday working week) but I can’t resist. Her comment that “men cannot be trusted to run things on their own” has, quite rightly, provoked outrage. It’s as sexist a statement as saying that “women cannot be trusted to run things on their own”, a phrase it’s hard to imagine a Labour politician countenancing.

Then there was the sound-bite that a bank called “Lehman Sisters” would have fared better than its real-life counterpart – which was inviting ridicule. It’s the sort of comment that might be uttered by some leaden spoof of a feminist, campaigning to change the name of Manchester to Womanchester.

And yet, perhaps, she has a point – although not one that she would be happy to see argued to its logical conclusion. In Iceland, one of the only banks to have survived its financial meltdown was set up and run by two women, who eschewed the risk-taking culture.

The problem for Harriet Harman is this. You can say that women are inherently more risk-averse, more responsible, more conscientious and caring, and that for these reasons they are more suited, as a gender, for certain jobs – such as running a bank without running up a debt so big you lose count of the zeroes. But if you say this, then you can’t argue that there are too many women in jobs which rely heavily on those qualities, such as nursing, or primary school teaching, or indeed raising a family. Either women are innately suited to certain jobs – whether this is in the context of bigging them up, or belittling them – or they are not. You can’t have it both ways.

Personally, my view is pretty pragmatic – there are some differences between the sexes caused by biology, some by social conditioning, but in any case a person’s individual character and abilities are far more significant than their gender.

Far better, you would have thought, to judge each individual on their merits alone, to recognise that some women will be more ruthlessly ballsy than some men; that some men more caring than some women; and employ them accordingly. Both a bank board and a government must benefit from a range of characters – the risk takers, the pioneers, the cautionary voices – but how patronising, how sexist, to assume that this balance can best be achieved by a tick box quota of boys and girls.